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Den Tandt: Tim Hudak faces do-or-die moment

Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak (left) stands with local candidate Larry Scott at a campaign rally in Oakville, Ont. on Tuesday June 10, 2014, as he continues his election campaign.Photo: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

Uninspiring? Depressing? Maddening? Pick your poison. As the Ontario election race limps into its final hours we are left much as we began, facing an unpalatable set of choices that bode nothing but trouble ahead for Canada’s largest province. If there’s any ray of light here, it’s hard to discern.

Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak, centre, laughs before he makes an announcement at a packaging plant about creating 40,000 jobs in Ontarioin this file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette)

Granted, PC leader Tim Hudak may yet win this thing. The latest polls could be wrong. They were way wrong in 2012 in Alberta. Hudak could win if his ground teams get out their vote and Grit leader Kathleen Wynne’s people stay home. He could win if New Democrat Andrea Horwath’s calculated shift to the centre succeeds only in drawing off enough disgruntled Liberals to split the centre-left. He could win if, deus ex machina, another major Liberal scandal erupts — in the next 20 hours. He could win a majority still. Nothing is certain.

But it’s all rather flimsy, nothing like the prospect of certain victory the Conservatives should be enjoying after 11 years of McGuinty Liberalism, replete with egregiously wasteful boondoggles, in a campaign marked by another half-billion-dollar scandal, and amid a regional depression in the manufacturing sector. Under these circumstances the wave of change should be compelling, urgent even. Yet it isn’t, apparently.

Rather, the Conservative leader faces long odds of taking a majority. Should he win a minority he could be deposed immediately, if Wynne and Horwath have the combined numbers to make a majority, and decide to work together. Or he could lose power within months. Wynne has already ruled out supporting a minority Hudak regime. Horwath has rejected a coalition with him, which in theory leaves open the possibility she’d prop them up, as she did Wynne for months. But how can that work? For Hudak, the man who has vowed to lop off the heads of 100,000 public servants, to find common ground with Horwath, would require both to contort themselves into shapes that would be un-recognizable to their own parties. It’s not plausible.

The most workable arrangement in a minority context, surreally, is another Liberal government — propped up, yet again, by the New Democrats. Poll aggregator threehundredeight.com, which called the Quebec election almost to the seat, has the Liberals taking a median 51 ridings, just shy of a majority. At dissolution they had 48. Groundhog Day.

How could this happen? Hudak won the televised debate last week, hands-down. But perhaps too few Ontarians were engaged enough by then to pay attention. The Harper Conservative government has shown, time and time again, that people vote their own interest. We can assume that Hudak’s early promise to take 100,000 employees off the provincial payroll — 15 per cent of the total, since nurses, doctors and cops are off limits — seemed too radical to many. Had he softened the blow, he might have avoided being branded as Dr. Scary. Had he said that making such cuts would be painful and regrettable, but necessary, he might even have won plaudits.

Instead it was left to his candidates in the ridings to mumble excuses about the job cuts, and his half-baked “million-jobs” projections too. He only ratcheted back his rhetoric once the damage was done. Shades of predecessor John Tory, with his eleventh-hour climbdown on secular schools funding, too late to prevent a rout.

Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak holds a town hall meeting in this file photo. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young)

As I and many others have written previously, there is no question but that Ontario’s economy is on the wrong track. There is no question but that spending and debt are out of control. There is no question but that these Liberals are unfit to manage the public purse of the country’s most populous province. There is no question but that the budget that precipitated this campaign was a tissue of half-baked promises, irresponsible and dishonest.

Having said that, there is also no doubt that many Ontarians, and not just those living in the Greater Toronto Area, do not remember the Mike Harris years in the 1990s as a happy time. The protests, the battles with unions, the Ipperwash mess, the breakage that occurred through the forced and often shoddy amalgamations of many municipalities, the pell-mell, ham-fisted deregulation that contributed to the Walkerton water tragedy, left a bitter and enduring taste. Faced with the prospect of a return to that, many Ontarians (again, if the polls bear out) have turned thumbs down, and basic economics be damned. Meantime, the provincial NDP, still languishing in the low twenties in support, face an existential crisis: Who are they, if their attempt to run as Liberals, with different bums in seats, falls flat?

This has to be galling, for Conservatives: Hudak needed only to show moderation — a reluctance to do harm, a non-ideological reach across the aisle. He could have faked it, and been believed. He chose otherwise, which is why his leadership now hangs in the balance. Come Thursday, he must pull of a June surprise. Otherwise, the blades will come out.

I am a national political columnist for Postmedia News. My work appears in the National Post, on Canada.com, the Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Halifax Chronicle-Herald... read more and Vancouver Sun, among other publications. I write primarily about national politics and policy.View author's profile